Via Dana, a federal judge yesterday dismissed a lawsuit challenging a ballot measure known as Proposition 2 that passed in Michigan in 2006, spearheaded by anti-affirmative action activist Ward Connerly. The law bans considering race and gender in college admissions and government hiring.

Anti-affirmative action advocates are celebrating and hoping that this settles the issue. Groups that advocate for affirmative action plan to appeal “immediately.” As we’ve written about before, eliminating affirmative action has a bad effect on campus diversity and furthers inequality that’s already purported by increasing debt loads and legacy admissions.

Campus Progress alum Dana Goldstein has a new article up on the American Prospect’s website on a subject of interest to CPers:  Anti-affirmative action activist Ward Connerly is launching five more state ballot initiatives against race conscious admissions in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma during the 2008 elections, and Dana did the reporting to break down the potential results.

Connerly’s latest tactic is emphasizing his support for socio-economic affirmative action—focusing on the poor instead of marginalized racial groups—because he and other critics think affirmative action does too much to help advantaged minorities. But, as I argued in recent piece of my own, affirmative action isn’t just about giving the disadvantaged the opportunity for higher education (though that’s an important and even overlapping goal), it’s about social justice—fixing serious, continuing problems of access for ethnic groups who face discrimination.  And it’s also a feminist issue, as Dana reports, and one that reaches beyond the college campus:

Linda Meric, co-chair of Colorado Unity, a labor, business, civil-rights, and religious coalition opposing the anti-affirmative action ballot initiative …  stressed that white women are major beneficiaries of affirmative action. "Women still face a significant wage gap when compared to men, and we believe that Coloradans support pay equity and programs that help women and girls get into nontraditional fields such as science and engineering," she told the Prospect.

Although affirmative action is understood primarily as a policy used in college admissions, a ban against it would affect a variety of state programs, some of which wouldn't be called "affirmative action" at all. The University of Colorado at Boulder’s Simply the Best program offers after-school technology enrichment, field trips, and visits to college campuses for African American and Latina teen girls. Colorado gives special health-care training to minority and bilingual professionals, which ensures more patients have access to culturally competent care. And the Colorado Minority Business Office helps people of color understand how to apply for state contracts.

But the wording of the initiative is designed to prey on economic and other insecurities of white voters who might fear—erroneously—that affirmative action could hurt them and other whites, despite endorsements of affirmative action from religious groups, the U.S. military, businesses, and politicians on both sides of the aisle.  The challenge, Dana writes, is “convincing white voters that these policies are more about helping women, people of color, and the poor than about hurting white men.”

Perhaps a larger challenge that Dana only touches on briefly in her piece is how the initiatives will affect voting patterns. In 2004, anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives brought conservative voters to the polls, hurting progressive candidates, especially in Ohio. Like gay marriage bans, anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives could serve as a get-out-the-vote mechanism for conservative voters; with it, we're likely to see success for other conservative candidates and policy proposals. But there is some hope: Dana thinks that white voters who might feel insecure enough to vote for Connerly's proposals might also support progressive economic policies and candidaes.

The New York Times Magazine has a special "college issue" this week. I haven't managed to get through all of it, but I did read the piece on affirmative action in college admissions. It seems that ever since the push to eliminate considering race in college admissions, the number of black kids on campuses around the country has plummeted. And it seems that it's more than rooted in race; it's rooted in class as well, since "colleges apparently put even more stock in the polish that comes with affluence — the well-edited essay, the summer trip to Guatemala, the Arabic language lessons. In any case, the poor lose." The piece goes on to point out that Pell Grants recipients, typically those in income brackets in the bottom 40 percent, are hovering somewhere around 10 percent at prestigious universities.

Indeed, since we still view college as the best conduit to achieving the American Dream, it seems odd that admission standards hinge so heavily on things that are best achieved through wealth. The prep courses for taking the SATs tend to be extremely expensive.  It's not just race, though, it's the poor. Of course, the poor tend to be overwhelmingly black and Latino.

Two schools have had real success in maintaining diversity: UCLA and UC-Berkeley. This is interesting, especially in the wake of the anti-affirmative action ballot initiative, Proposition 209. What the piece wonders is if there was some "under-the-table" affirmative action taking place. But is this a bad thing? The campuses are more diverse and successful than ever. 

Today's the anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech.  If you've gone through life without ever having heard or read the entire speech (which is very possible, since we usually only hear 2 lines in most public school systems), I recommend you check it out.

Ward Connerly and his minions often try to appropriate Dr. King's words to criticize affirmative action, citing the famous line, "I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." 

But, if Dr. King were alive today, he'd likely be horrified at the continued attacks on affirmative action, through premeditated state-by-state ballot initiatives and conservative activism on college campuses, such as the infamous "affirmative action bake sales" across the nation.  Connerly continues the fight in a number of new states, and in the next year, your state could be next.  Campus Progress is working with college students to make sure that you're prepared to fight back, and through action grants, events, and trainings.  If you're interested in learning more on how Campus Progress can work with you to keep Dr. King's dream alive, email campus@campusprogress.org

The Boston Globe runs down the threat posed to Metco, a program that buses minority students from Boston out to some of the whitest suburban schools (including those in my hometown of Newton), by the recent Supreme Court decision that greatly restricts the ability of school districts to use race as a factor in integration efforts. Nothing’s happened (read: no one’s sued) yet, but Metco advocates’ biggest fear is that the court decision will eventually force them to accept white students into the program. If this happens, it could spell of Metco, which has been around for four decades: “Admit white students, suburban superintendents say, and their communities may pull out because the program's purpose was to diversify their predominantly white schools.”

Included is in the obligatory and obligatorily cute picture of a while kid playing with some black kids.

Is America’s public education system heading towards crisis?

 
Stephen Jordan, writing for Inside Higher Ed, tackles this question—offering a dire assessment of America’s secondary and higher educational apparatus.

Jordan finds urban high schools and state-colleges are failing their students. The three-pronged assault of dwindling funding, raising tuition, and growing accountability standards have harshly afflicted urban areas: where students cannot keep pace with raising fees. 

But has this led to a new color line in America’s education system?

An article in my school’s daily paper addresses efforts by international students to change the college’s admissions policy. Currently, the applications of all North American (US, Canada, Mexico) students are processed independently of their financial aid applications. This is not true for international students. At a quick glance, only Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Williams, and Middlebury provide need-blind admission to international students.

 On its face, the argument seems pretty simple. As the college seeks to diversify its student body with international students, there is little to be gained for the college or the students by a policy that selects for wealthier applicants. This is especially true considering the low price-tag (at least in Dartmouth’s case, at $1.2 million) of the policy change.

Of course, it comes down to an issue of priorities. I think it’s a fair argument, but in my ironically (my parents immigrated on student visas) ethnocentric way, I think activist energy and college resources should be focused towards improving access to higher education, larger aid packages, and better recruiting among socioeconomic and racial groups that are disadvantaged in America. They aren’t mutually exclusive, but academic institutions are conservative (reluctant to change) by nature, and in the rare event of a dialogue leading to policy change, I think it is important to keep the larger picture in mind.

According to a new study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, more than a quarter--and at some schools as many as half--of black college students are first or second generation immigrants, not African American descendents of slaves. Which schools' black populations are most heavily composed of immigrants? You guessed it--the Ivies. As the Brown Daily Herald reports:

The study's authors noted that once immigrant black students are enrolled in college, their performances do not differ from those whose families have a longer history in the United States. They did, however, find that immigrant blacks have distinct advantages over non-immigrants in gaining acceptance to selective colleges and universities, including statistically higher SAT scores, higher attendance of private schools and a better likelihood that one or both parents graduated from college.

Elite universities like to brag about their diversity. What this study compels, I think, is the realization (if you ever doubted it) that universities need to be doing much more to reach out to African American communities that aren't as upwardly mobile as recent immigrant families tend to be. Immigrants and children of immigrants bring important perspectives to campuses, and should also be beneficiaries of affirmative action policies. But the color of their skin doesn't let schools off the hook from aggressively recruiting students whose families are victims of generations of American racism. Of course, this is a huge challenge, especially considering the sub-par public schools so many low-income kids attend--schools that do little to prepare students for college academics. But by instituting tutoring and mentoring programs in public schools, some universities are doing their best to foster relationships that bring low-income and minority students to elite colleges.

What more can be done? Should college applications ask students to identify themselves not just by race, but by immigration status as well? Should forms distinguish between the categories of "black," "African American," "African," and the like?